MRVL Drops 11% as Jury Says $1.2B in Damages Owed Carnegie Mellon

By Tiernan Ray

Shares of chip maker Marvell Technology Group (MRVL)are down 92 cents, or 11%, at $7.33, and fell as low as $7.19, after a jury serving the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, ordered the company to pay Carnegie Mellon University $1.17 billion for infringing on patents held by the school pertaining to data storage.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark’swrite-up of the verdict, the jury threw out Marvell claims that the patents were invalid, and that because Marvell was found to have willfully infringed, it may be subject to paying treble damages.

Marvell competes with a host of top semiconductor designers making chips for disk-drive control functions and for mobile devices, among other things, including Broadcom (BRCM), Qualcomm (QCOM), Nvidia (NVDA), and LSI (LSI).

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.